Career Success

The Real Formula For Career Fulfillment

It's A Man's World" is a column on anything and everything related to the modern man, by Ian Lang. If there are any topics you'd like to see addressed here, send them to us at editorial@askmen.com, or let us know in the comments section.

It’s time again for one of those unanswerable rhetorical surveys I like to conduct: How many of you are satisfied with your job? Fortunately, thanks to The Conference Board’s 2010 survey, I know that the answer is roughly less than half of you. Having been involved in human capital consulting for several years now, I know that spells trouble for employers. A dissatisfied worker is an unengaged one, and unengaged workers are less productive and less loyal than those reporting high levels of satisfaction and engagement. In short, more than half of the American workforce is composed of people who are only there because they have to be. Is this the fault of the employers?

Maybe a little bit. In an economically efficient world, employees would slot themselves into jobs that best suited them, and vice versa. As the demand for jobs continues to outpace availability, the perceived value of a given job rises. This allows employers to be both more selective and less concerned with their employees’ satisfaction, because there’s really no incentive to be concerned. Yes, the cost to onboard a new employee is high, but at least it can be accounted for. What can’t be as easily accounted for is the more abstract figure of revenue lost due to employee dissatisfaction. Ergo, in a world where there’s an effectively endless supply of asses waiting to fill very few seats, it makes some sense for employers to churn through them until they find the right match.

So how's your job?

So that leaves us. As employees, we’re largely responsible for our own dissatisfaction, and for a very simple reason: We don’t know what to focus on. We strive for a misconstrued version of success, when what we really need to focus on is contentment. The big-time lawyer who makes a million dollars a year but absolutely hates his job is no more a success than the bus driver who loves what he does but is a financial failure. In fact, that lawyer might represent the grandest form of failure, because en route to his lofty but miserable existence he had every conceivable resource at his disposal. The bus driver is just a guy who really likes driving buses and is perfectly happy doing so.

Contentment has become a four-letter word lately, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it sounds lazy to generations of innate overachievers or suggests some notion of compromise or settling. That’s not how I think of it. Contentment is that feeling you have when you’re catching up with old friends over a few beers, or that un-erasable smile you have on your face when the weather’s perfect and you or your foursome has the golf course all to yourselves. It’s cuddling up with your sweetie in post-coital bliss because nothing in the world could be any better at that moment. We all want it, but we don’t all know how to get it.

Fortunately, I’ve figured it out, and it’s three simple things: talent, ambition and work ethic. The three don’t carry equal weight. Sound too obvious or overly simplistic? Don’t worry guys, I’ve chewed it up and digested it, and now I’m about to momma-bird it right back at you. Let’s look at what those three things really mean, as well as how they interact.

Talent

I’m talking about talent first for one reason: It’s without question the least important factor involved in achieving career contentment. You don’t have to take my word for it; look around you. Chances are you’re surrounded by people who may be able to complete their jobs but are entirely unremarkable in terms of their talent (if you don’t see these people, chances are you’re the one lacking in the talent department). Talent is complicated, because while as an entity it’s simply your ability to perform a task, it encompasses all sorts of things like intelligence, knowledge and even your physical aptitude for certain tasks. Talent is least important for two reasons: One, there are limitations to how much you can grow your own talent. You may be able to learn new skills, but you can’t easily or cost-effectively make yourself smarter. Once you hit adulthood, you more or less have all the intellectual horsepower you’re going to have. Two, most jobs these days simply don’t require a ton of talent. We live in an automated world where no one has to be all that skilled at anything to do most jobs.

You’ll never hear this from employers, because when hiring workers, talent is often the only thing they can quantifiably ascertain. You went to X school and have X work experience, so presumably you have the talent needed to do this job. Also, if you’re in a position to be selective, why not acquire the most talented people you can (besides running the risk of building an overqualified, disengaged workforce)? Ambition and work ethic, on the other hand, can only be observed after the fact, so there’s no real way for employers to factor it into the hiring process. Talent shouldn’t be overlooked, though, because knowing your strengths, capabilities and limitations should play a big role in the next piece of the career contentment puzzle: ambition.

Ambition

Ambition pisses me off sometimes, because people tend to use it so flippantly. “He’s ambitious,” they’ll say of the young financier with his sights set on becoming a managing director. Similarly, someone who’s happy in what most people see as a dead-end job is said to lack ambition. That’s wrong, because everyone has ambitions, just not always the right ones.

Defining your ambitions is to define exactly what success looks like for you, and almost no one does this correctly. What sort of industry do you want to work in? What do you like to do at work every day (a question that is often tragically overlooked)? How much money do you need to be happy? These are all questions that people need to ask themselves but usually don’t. People talk about their ambitions in very vague terms, usually something like, “I want to make a lot of money” or “I want a prestigious C-level position.” This is so detrimental to achieving contented success, because it’s fundamentally difficult to find happiness if you have no idea what happiness looks like.